


The Sixteen Trials of Skaia

by YamiTami



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-31
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:06:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiTami/pseuds/YamiTami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two universes, two sessions. Sixteen heroes, sixteen trials. The dreamers of Derse and Prospit woke up to find a nightmare of impossible odds. With the deck stacked against them how will they survive?</p><p>(A/N: I won't be working on Homestuck fics anymore, so this is effectively done)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clouded Prophecy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jade wondered if there was a reason for any of it.

She knew it was going to be hard. She saw the inevitability of the reckoning falling to a checkered land, the white army doomed to fated failure, she saw herself and three others fighting strange creatures. She was barely six when she woke on Prospit and started staring into the clouds of Skaia. For the next ten years—an entire decade—she dreamed. There were times she wished she didn’t have to sleep the early years of her life away, but at the end of the day she was okay with. Since it would help them win the game she was happy for the sacrifice.

If it helped them win the game.

Jade was nine when her grandfather died. Her clouds showed her the future and she had seen him stuffed in front of the fireplace, but even after it happened she didn’t know _how_ or _why_. It... nagged at her, not knowing. In time she learned not to think about it since there wasn’t anything she could do. She decided she just had to have faith that one day the clouds would give her the answer she was looking for.

Grandpa took his place motionless at the fireplace and Bec became her sole caregiver. Well, Bec and the internet. When she dreamed she traveled the streets of Prospit but when she was awake she traveled the Earth through the web. She saw the Rocky Mountains, the dunes of the Sahara, and the deepest, greenest parts of the Amazon. She saw the bright lights of New York City, found the fanciful creatures of the Australian Outback, and toured the crowded streets of Tokyo. She wanted to see everything, she wanted to go everywhere. She longed for the say when the game was over and she got to travel to all the places in her Grandpa’s scrapbooks and then some.

Jade was eleven when she first dreamed of her friends. She knew their names because of the present of pumpkin seeds (the part about them disappearing was distressingly true), but up until then she didn’t have a way to contact the three kids she was apparently responsible for bringing together. Her patience and faith paid off and the clouds finally came through. She was red text and spinning records and the URL to a music forum. She went there immediately, found his profile, and then found herself at a loss.

It wasn’t as though she didn’t talk to people, human people, but this was different. TurntechGodhead wasn’t like the others. He—she wasn’t sure but it felt right to assume that this was Dave and not Rose—wasn’t some random screen name or the people who maintained her Grandpa’s company; he was going to be her _friend_. She didn’t feel bad about lying to others about where or how she lived since they wouldn’t believe her anyway, but with him...

One day TG and the other two would know about her island, her dreambot, and the crackling ball of green lightning that was her guardian and best friend. “I live on an island completely alone except for my trans-dimensional dog” was the truth, but it wasn’t exactly normal. Jade didn’t want them to resent her for lying to them, but she didn’t want to lose them before their friendship began by coming off as crazy.

Jade fretted and worried until her stomach ached and finally she decided to just go for it. She went to the introduction forum and made her post. She didn’t write about the game, or her taxidermied grandfather, but she wrote out everything else about her island and the frog ruins and Bec. Once she made the thread she sat there nervously refreshing every few minutes to check replies.

It wasn’t as though she was unaware of how people on the internet could be, particularly when there’s a newcomer to their circle talking about teleporters and dreambots and magic dogs, but she didn’t expect it to be quite that bad. Even her dealings with the jerks in her trollslum weren’t as bad as some of the comments she was getting on the forum. She sunk lower in her chair with every reply she got. She didn’t care at all what these people thought of her, but the thought of TG-probably-Dave reacting the same way terrified her. When she refreshed the forum page and saw that he made the latest reply on her thread it took her a few minutes to work up the nerve to read it.

She laughed in sheer relief as she read and realized she never had to worry. TurntechGodhead started out saying that he didn’t know if she was being deliberately ironic or if it was completely unintentional and that he couldn’t tell which one was better. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but since he seemed to like her for it she was all for the irony. He then proceeded to claim her as one of his minions and said that her new status put her about twenty rungs higher on a ten-rung ladder than the rest of the musically minded assholes in her intro thread.

They spent a few months getting to know each other—he spent them constantly insisting that she was fifty, balding, and a dude—before TG decided she was probably crazy but cool nonetheless and told her that his name was Dave. When she told him that she guessed that he took it with the same one eyebrow raised friendly disbelief she’d come to expect from him.

When her clouds showed her blond hair, a headband, and purple text she didn’t question. She introduced herself in the same way as she did Dave and, sure enough, while Rose was skeptical she didn’t turn away. John was even more accepting of the strangeness than the other two; Jade guessed this was because he must be the boy in the other tower on Prospit, so they might share a closer bond with each other than with Rose and Dave. The Derse dreamers hit it off and spoke in a strange, snarky, sarcastic language that Jade didn’t fully understand, so she hoped that they shared the same comforting closeness that she felt when talking to John.

As the four of them grew closer and closer Jade felt less and less isolated, even though she never left her lonely island. They were more than just fellow champions, they were her friends, and Jade was sure that together they could conquer the challenges her dreams had shown her. Even with the trolls telling her this was the day she would ruin everything she knew that they were going to be okay.

She was sixteen when John’s neighborhood became a smoking crater on the news feed and he explored the Land of Wind and Shade with Nannasprite watching over him. Rose’s woods burned down around her and she dove off the edge into the Land of Light and Rain with Jaspersprite ready to catch her. Dave’s city crumbled in screaming fire and he found himself standing in a quieter and more oppressive heat in the Land of Heat and Clockwork.

Jade received a pester from TurntechGodhead not long after that, but instead of the familiar red the text was a light creamy orange. It was plain to her that it was still Dave, though he was being even more evasive than usual. The conversation was very confusing and ended suddenly. She was still trying to work out what just happened when Dave, red text Dave, pestered her and caught her up about the orange creamsicle self-prototyped feathery asshole.

She was... disconcerted. Not so much about the doomed timeline in which she and John died—she’d known about her dead dreamself for years—but because she didn’t know about it. A doomed timeline in itself probably wouldn’t be something her clouds could show her, but Davesprite was in the alpha timeline and his presence changed a lot of things. It seemed as though she should have at least caught a glimpse of an orange glowing Dave, even if she wasn’t given any context for what it meant, but she hadn’t seen anything. Jade was confident in what she knew about what was going to happen, she felt she was properly prepared for her role, and she was sure that the cloudless predictions made by the trolls were completely untrue.

Jade was still confident, she had to be, but after her encounter with Davesprite there were hairline cracks in the foundation. As the others started listening to the trolls more and more and even started trusting them she grew more and more worried for her friends, and as the trolls proved more and more useful and more and more _right_ the cracks grew too.

The rubble of Prospit’s moon beat against her side as she fell to the checkered hills. Her broken ribs protested as she drew her last pained breaths, but as much as it hurt and as scary as it was she was okay with dying. She knew it was coming, of course, but more than that it was the knowledge that her death was for a reason. She saved John and even as the ground rushed up to meet her the thought that he was her brother brought a smile to her face.

When she woke back on Earth she was still glad that she saved John, and if she had the chance to do it over she would do it again without hesitation. But that quiet peace her dreamself felt in the seconds before her death, even as the moon crumbled around her, that feeling slipped away.

Then she crashed through her atrium windows seeing nothing but the faint green glow of the cloth that covered her eyes. She had seen herself in the Land of Frost and Frogs, she knew that she had to survive this somehow, but falling blind through the hot sky she had a hard time finding any comfort in the peaceful clouds of Skaia. Jade remembered the last moments of her dreamself’s life, the wind deafening her and that sickening instant of impact, and her steadfast faith in the certainty of her visions deserted her. She screamed in terror as she plummeted and reflexively pulled the trigger to fire at a foe she couldn’t see, something that didn’t exist in a physical sense. She could barely hear the gunshot over the wind and the far off crackle of fire. She wondered if she’d burn up before she even hit the ground and that thought gave way to hysterics even as the blindfold disappeared and the temperature dropped as quickly as she was.

Jade blacked out and woke to the screeching soundtrack of a thousand horrorterrors whispering just outside her dream bubble. She didn’t know who the gray girl claiming to be a princess was, but between the claim to be one of the twelve trolls and the lack of fear of the monstrosities whispering black dreadful wordless things, Jade wasn’t exactly inclined to trust her. One nightmare later and she was dealing with two jerks claiming to be the same jerk while fighting off a splitting headache and trying to get her bearings. Finally she recovered enough to comprehend exactly what had happened.

The trolls were right. Everything she believed shattered. She pulled herself together because however much she had been lied to and however blindly she had led everyone into a horrible trap, she still had a job to do. She still had to do her part to get herself and her friends out of the terrible mess they were smack dab in the middle of.

Jade continued her quest. She talked to Karkat and wished she’d listened to him before, she got some tips from Kanaya and realized not all the trolls were as mean as she thought. She and Dave lit the forge, that is after she tackled him and hugged him for roughly an hour and broke half his ribs according to his estimate. She only smiled because she knew it was just his usual joking; he didn’t push her away. She kept hugging him and touching his arm or shoulder just to prove to herself he was really _there_ , the first human being she’d been able to touch in so many years. He raised an eyebrow at her need for near constant physical contact but he didn’t say anything. She knew that he understood, she knew that Rose and John would understand, and in spite of everything the thought made her giddy. They were in an awful situation and her dreams were useless, but together they’d figure something out.


	2. Red Pulse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knew, from the moment he was old enough to know anything, that he was different. It was dim, but he remembered fighting his way out of his cocoon and staring up at the bright candy red lining laid open for all to see. He didn’t understand _why_ it scared him so much, but it did, and he ran away as fast as his still unfamiliar legs could carry him. The panic didn’t subside until he found a cool underground river. He jumped in over his head, inhaled a few lungfuls of water, and then flailed his way back to the shore. While he was still under the water didn’t seem like such a problem but as soon as he reintroduced air to his body he was violently hacking up his share of the river and the red pupation mucus still filling his lungs. He coughed so hard that tears streamed down his face, and once he realized those red drips were coming from him he stopped dead and scrubbed with his hands until his hair and skin were free of that candy red slime and tears, and only then did the unnamable instinctive panic drain from his veins.

Once he caught his breath he turned curious eyes on himself. Now that he stopped running he realized how _weird_ it was to run on two long legs instead of scurrying on six. He looked down at his chest—his thin grub body replaced with something gray and tough—and ran strange fingers down his ribs. There were four dark marks, one pair at the bottom of his ribcage and the other a little above his hips, and the last pair of legs were still there high on his chest. He blinked at the nubby yellow things, something in his mind saying that they weren’t supposed to be there. After a moment something surfaced, a memory from less than an hour before but it felt like sweeps. He was curled around himself in the sticky warmth of his cocoon and then when he was ready instinct drove him to unfurl, arching his chest forward and using the remnants of his infant form to pierce the layers of slimy webbing.

He was still poking at the wriggler legs as though he expected them to come off when another troll splashed into the river. He blinked at their gray form, not really looking at them but looking at himself, using them in place of a mirror to see what his new body looked like. When his eyes rested on the tri colored horns he lifted his hands to feel the top of his own head. After knocking into them once and wincing—they were still soft and pale but were hardening by the second—he gingerly explored the dimensions of his horns and tried to translate what he was feeling to a picture. It took a while before he realized that the other troll had lifted their hands to their head and were mirroring the horn inspection.

He took a closer look. The other troll had fins on either side of his jaw and when he brought his hands down across his cheeks he was surprised to find that he had none, and then was surprised that he had been surprised. There were also six dark curved marks, three on each side midway down the torso, that he found he lacked. The other troll made a similar inspection of their own body, prodding the things they didn’t see.

Another troll ran up covered in slime. Like the first they splashed around for a little while before realizing they weren’t alone and making a curious visual examination. Like the first the new troll had fins and gills—the fact that those dark marks were called gills and that they were for breathing underwater floated up in his mind and he didn’t know where it came from—but they were different from the other two because they didn’t have the same anatomy between their legs. That made them a girl and he and the other troll were boys. Girls were called she and her and they were strong, boys were called him and his and they were strong but not as strong as girls.

More things he knew without knowing how. He tilted his head to the side and tried to reason out how he could know the names for fins and gills and boy and girl. There were other things that he knew but they were partially hidden, like how the moving water of the river made the shapes of the rocks blur and dance, but once he focused on something then all the rocks having to do with that something rose up out of the water and made sense. It took longer than with the things he saw, but after thinking about how he could know it the rock having to do with it began to surface; the thick, sweet, gooey casks lining the pitch-dark caverns. That puzzled him more, because the things in his head said that was his food when he was a wriggler.

He realized he was hungry, then, and very tired from his metamorphosis and both over and under stimulated from the new way he took in his surroundings. The traces of his cocoon were sharp on his tongue and the running water hurt his ears. At the same time, everything seemed dimmer, and that way of knowing that still confused him said that there was still the same amount of light, but his eyes had changed to something less sensitive so that he’d be able to survive on the surface.

He blinked and he frowned as he tried to grasp the idea of _surface_. Even the river of knowing had problems with that. Something that big and open and _bright_ just couldn’t exist, and if it did then there was no way that _he_ could survive there. Light hurt, that was one of the dangers that made sure the wrigglers never strayed far from the cavern chains they were hatched in. He thought he could remember trying once, curious about where the tunnels went, but soon enough he got his first taste of diffused sunlight and retreated back to the comforting darkness where he would be safe.

Fear rose, making his pulse pound in his ears so loud it drowned out the river. He hugged his unfamiliar form and tried to _understand_ all the strange things filling his head, but it was all too much. He knew what surface was but he didn’t, he had all the puzzle pieces in his mind but he didn’t have the context to put them together. He realized he was thinking of puzzles as though he had ever seen one and he found he didn’t want to know what it was, he didn’t want all these things in his head that he couldn’t understand, he didn’t want to have two legs and two arms and gray skin, he didn’t want to leave the caverns and—

“Hah... haaaaah...”

His head snapped up. In his mounting panic he didn’t notice one of the other trolls, the girl, crossing the river. She stepped onto his bank, still several big steps away from him, and wrinkled her nose as she tried out her voice once again.

“Hah...lo?” she said once, then again, more slowly, “Hello?”

She beamed when she got the word right, then turned expectant eyes on him. He didn’t want to find out if his voice sounded like _that_ instead of the quiet trills and churs that filled his ears before they all spun their cocoons. But something welled up in him, not overpowering but it was certainly there, that he should answer the girl. She was brave, like she should be since she was a girl and she had fins and gills, and because she was brave she should be respected. The meaning for ‘respected’ and ‘feared’ blurred together in his mind. He decided to answer her.

“Ynnnn...” making his tongue and windhole do the things he wanted them to do was harder than he thought it would be. “Yerrrr... youh... yesssss.” Pride bubbled up when he got it right. “Yes! Ah... yes?”

She absently raised a hand to touch her fins. “Ahrn... are? Are yah... you a larn, lan, landel,” she struggled with the word. “Landerln... land...dweh...ler. Land dweller. Are you a land dweller?”

The unknowable things told him that it was the right word for someone who didn’t have fins and gills. “Yes,” he answered, though it was toned as a question. He wasn’t sure if he should trust the things he knew or not.

“Oh,” she said. Then, sounding a little distressed, she asked, “Thasss... that is... why do I know whah, whan, what, that is?”

He shrugged. She frowned, not at him but at the things in her think pan. He found his eyes wandering up to her head. Her horns were short and curved back and up. He looked between her fins and her horns and for some reason he thought it was wrong. It wasn’t the strange knowing, at least, it didn’t feel the same as knowing thinks he had never seen. It felt like a memory, hazy and distant like his memory of the gooey nectar or venturing down the tunnels, but someone that he knew because he _saw_ it.

Her horns were wrong, he thought, they should stand up straight on her head instead of laying down, and they should curve outwards in a gentler arc than the tight curl they were in. He looked at the boy and thought that his straight notched horns were wrong. They were supposed to be longer, and thinner, and have two angles in each. There was also supposed to be a patch of bright purple between them, but the boy’s hair was completely black. He wondered if it was just because they were fresh out of their cocoons, if her horns would straighten as they dried and hardened and if the purple streak would appear in time.

Something in the things he couldn’t know told him that wasn’t true. It latched onto ‘purple’ as though it was important. For some reason it made him think of staring up at his split cocoon and feeling afraid, of the bright red slime that he washed off. His pulse roared and it was something to fear, his vascular pump was something to fear, the blood in his veins was something to be feared, highbloods were to be feared and the specifics of _highblood_ slipped through his hands but he knew he had to get away and get away _fast_.

They called after him, both the voices echoing after him as he ran down the tunnels. Away from the caverns he hatched in, away from his cocoon, just _away_. He didn’t get all that far, his legs and lungs unused to such activity. He collapsed in a heap against the tunnel wall. He wanted so badly to cry but that strange unlearned horrible knowing told him that he should fear that as well. He cowered behind a rock formation and tried just to breathe. Soon, he passed into a fitful sleep.

He came awake screaming from the terrible whispers that filled his mind to overflowing. There were unspeakable things chasing him, things with too many eyes all watching him and too many mouths all calling his name, and he needed to get away. Sopor, he knew, sopor would take them away. It was green, bright like a beacon. It would be further into the caverns, the knowing told him, in pools along the side just like the school casks in the brood caverns. But the green pools would be farther apart, scarcer, and every other young troll who just woke up huddled in a terrified ball would want to claim their share of the slime for themselves, and it would never be enough.

Fighting meant bleeding.

Bleeding was the worst thing he could do.

He scrambled up and ran, he kept running even when his body screamed at him to stop. He reasoned that if he stayed ahead of the rest then there would be plenty of sopor and no one would be fighting yet. If he just stayed ahead then he wouldn’t spill his blood where other trolls could see it. This wasn’t the knowing, but his own reasoning, and the fact that it was _his_ felt so good he could ignore how his muscles ached. When he found the first pools, bright and poison and comforting and wonderful, he collapsed into the warm welcoming embrace and fell blissfully and dreamlessly asleep.

He woke to the sound of a gentle splashing. There were a few other trolls in the pool with him, but they were still spaced out enough that it wasn’t crowded. The splashing, he found, didn’t come from any of them, but from a pipe that was bolted to the rock walls. It dripped new sopor into the pool for a while, then shut off. He squinted at the dark line of the pipe where it curved up to the cavern’s ceiling. It snaked between the cones and drapes of stone. In some places it leaked, the thick slime sticking to the pipe and marking it with darker green smudges.

Everything had its source, the knowing said. The river he washed in came from somewhere, the water bubbled up or fell down and then it gathered and flowed together across the distance. He reasoned that the sopor had to come from somewhere. Following the pipe seemed like as good an idea as any.

He had a feeling, that might have been the knowing and might have been pure animal instinct, that there were nasty things down those tunnels. Not as bad as the things that chased him in his dreams, but bad enough. Possibly the most dangerous were the other trolls. He knew he had to be ready. He found a spire of rock, sharp at the end but dull enough at the bigger part that he could hold it, and started walking.


	3. Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From his earliest, foggiest memories, Equius Zahhak knew who he was, what he was, and what was expected of him. He barely remembered the trials, just flashes of running and fighting the creatures in the tunnels, but he remembered that sense of purpose and direction. His first solid, distinct memory was when he emerged from the trials victorious, the soft pink moonlight bathing him, and he had been given his sign and name.

Equius clearly remembered receiving his first shirt. Some of the other wrigglers in line were scared of the strange machine and the device that punctured their arm and drew out a rainbow of blood. They had just spent a season or more in the trial caverns where things with pincers generally ate a young troll, and many fought the metal beasts. Equius didn’t. He was fascinated by the moving parts and watched closely as it secured his arm, trying to figure out how the device functioned, but what calmed him more than his curiosity was his schoolfeeding, which was telling him that it was proper. That it was what was supposed to happen that way.

He turned out to be right; the machine processed the vial of brilliant blue it drew from his veins and printed his newly assigned sign on a baggy black shirt. His other shirts would be printed with synthetic dyes, but the first one, his trialright, was made with his own blood. Four lines reminiscent of an arrow, and it felt so right to wear it. He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding; even though he had found the rough, serviceable tunic stockpile early in his journey through the caverns and had been clothed ever since, he had still felt naked. Having a name was a comfort, but it wasn’t until he had the blue sign on his chest that he felt at ease.

It wasn’t until he was a few sweeps older that he understood why he felt that way. The fact that the syrupy pools in the grub caverns were the school casks was easy enough to grasp even when he was fresh from the trials, but his mind was still too young to understand how the knowledge filling his head could be there. But as he aged and his think pan expanded he was able to understand the more complicated and abstract pieces of knowledge tucked away inside his head. It was how schoolfeeding worked; facts and skills were poured into a grub’s head but only the things they could understand floated to the surface. That which a troll wasn’t yet developed enough to grasp remained locked away so that they weren’t overwhelmed. If a wriggler could actually feel all the information crammed into their minds at once it would drive them mad.

Equius came to understand that this was why he felt so wrong to be without a sign and so right to receive his. At the time he didn’t have the context to call up something as abstract as the definition of slavery, but once he was a few sweeps old he realized that he felt wrong being without his sign because slaves were stripped of theirs. As a freetroll he should always wear his.

Once he realized that his infant self’s discomfort was caused by doing something that belonged to the wrong category, he began to explore himself to figure out which categories he fit into. Most of the things he did were because of the strong inclinations his schoolfeeding gave him, but even in the cases where his behavior didn’t change it felt very nice to be able to put a name to why he did it. He used the proper names for things—such as ‘bath tub’ or ‘fridge’—because he was a highblood. Once he corrected the few instances where he was in the habit of using the common slang—one was using ‘load gaper’ instead of ‘toilet’—he felt more at ease. The same went for other minor deviations he remedied once he was aware they existed. With each improper facet of his behavior corrected he felt the previously unidentified stress flow out of him; the tension was caused by differences in his behavior and how his instincts, his schoolfeeding, told him he should behave.

He quickly discovered that not all trolls felt the same. When he ventured out of his hive and saw others in his lawnring speaking or behaving incorrectly he would correct them with the assumption that they had not yet realized the things he had, and that with a gentle, polite nudge they would become more aware of their actions. A few, very few, looked thoughtful after listening to his polite reminder. Most sneered. They saw his behavior as either arrogance or weakness. Arrogance that he thought he could control their actions even though they belonged to the same caste or weakness that he would try to _help_ so many who weren’t his quadrants or allies.

It wasn’t until this was shouted at him that Equius realized he _was_ trying to help them. It didn’t feel weak, to him, but he couldn’t explain why. He just wanted them to be the best that they could be... but that was wrong, that was stupid, because it would make it so much harder to survive. Culling came every three seasons as a simple fact of existence, and if he helped the others be better then it lessened his own chances of surviving. He shouldn’t protect a troll from culling unless they were filling one of his quadrants or allies. Both were important—quadrants filled the void in a troll’s core, the allies would pool their skills so they would be more attractive to potential captains when it came time to join the fleet—and he would only make himself less appealing to both if he continued how he was.

This realization didn’t come from the schoolfeeding, but from logic. Something still felt off, wrong, but he assumed it was because this was the first truly important piece of learning that he had somehow missed. It wasn’t all that shocking that there was such a gap, he realized upon reflection. It was how the school casks functioned. Those casks right next to the egg clusters were the only guarantee, containing the most basic information. They held the knowing that urged newly pupated wrigglers towards the trials, the instinct for fighting, reading and writing, and other core necessities. Once the grubs ventured out of that first cave chance and fate came into play. Some sampled many casks and went into the trials with an introduction in many types of knowledge, others drank deeply from a few and knew much more about fewer subjects.

It was becoming clear to the young troll that he was of the second category. He must have drank his larval belly full at a cask dedicated to decorum and propriety for him to feel so strongly about incorrect behaviors which other trolls barely noticed or didn’t notice at all. He was also far ahead of most of the trolls in his lawnring when it came to mathematics and artificial science but fell far behind when it came to the natural sciences, history, literature, and legend. Gaps in his schoolfeeding, casks he passed over or didn’t reach. He’d noticed voids in his knowledge before and had identified the ones he needed to fill so that he could be a productive servant of the Empress.

Those previously identified gaps hadn’t bothered him, but this drive to help others be as proper as him was a void in an area he _did_ know. It was not proper for a troll to show such weakness, let alone a troll with blood as blue as his, and it took him by surprise when the impropriety was pointed out. But after some reflection he came to a conclusion: it was inevitable that he would have missed something even in his stronger areas of knowledge. Even drinking deeply from only a few casks it was impossible to absorb every iota of data available on a given subject. He told himself that while it might seem strange—this was a very central part of troll society that he somehow missed—when he looked through the filter of the mechanics of schoolfeeding it wasn’t that odd at all.

Something felt wrong in that conclusion, but Equius ignored it. Any fault would be identified and mended. He still knew who he was.

This surety served him well when puberty hit. The excessive sweating was embarrassing enough, but then he started breaking things without meaning to. In a season he jumped from not quite strong enough to properly draw a bow to _far_ too strong. Every variation, every shape in every material, they all snapped in his hands. The noble weapon he so looked forward to learning once he was old enough was reduced to a pair of useless splintered twigs connected by a bit of cord again and again and again. Aurthour did what he could to comfort his charge, and for a while it helped. Equius’s lusus would always be there with a fresh towel or a cold glass of milk, he would always be there to clean up the broken pieces of whatever it was the troll had broken that day. But then the perigees passed and things didn’t get any better no matter what lengths Equius took to control his rebellious body. The towels were all soaked, the milk glasses all shattered in his hands, and there was no end to Aurthour’s cleaning.

Equius’s faith in the order of things, in the way of his kind, in who he was served him well, but only for a time. There was only so much one five and a half sweep old troll could take. One too many broken bows, one too many shattered glasses, one too many times he forgot his strength and one too many times he bruised his devoted lusus... he fell into despair. It was clear to him that he would never be able to take his place among the refined and elegant in the fleet. How could he be anything other than a mindless brawler? Worse than a lowblood of the same skills because he was supposed to be better, more civilized, he was a _blueblood_ and he couldn’t live up to the shade of the sign on his shirt.

He broke everything in his hive. He raged without any purpose except the desire to make his home reflect what was in his mind. He was in shreds, in pieces, and his hive would follow.

A momentary salvation came to him in the scattered fragments of a dozen mechanical devices. He wasn’t interested in the organic circuitry of his husktop—splintered case in five different pieces and the fluids oozing down the legs of his desk—but those devices made of pure machinery fascinated him. Gears and wires and silicon wafers littered the floors and he found himself staring at the mess with curiosity. For ages Equius had steadfastly ignored his interest in how machines worked—that was a yellowblood’s interest, green at the best—but since he was already a brawler he didn’t see what further harm it could do.

He lost himself in studying the broken remnants of once functioning machines. When replacements arrived he took every single one of them apart. Equius looked up every guide on mechanics he could find and voraciously devoured every source. It helped where everything proper hadn’t. There were so many wires, so many fiddly little gears, so many pieces that fit into the whole of each device. The interest in systematic destruction blossomed into something more.

It wasn’t long before he felt confident enough to build something from scratch, or nearly so. The more delicate components he ordered pre-assembled and he used pre-programmed datacombs for the basic functions, but the frame and joints and fuel lines he built himself. He practiced endlessly and soon enough he learned how to modify and tune those pre-made components to better suit his purposes.

Soon enough the soothing effect ran its course. He was a blueblood with oil-stained hands, a blueblood elbow deep in machinery. He couldn’t even make fine, delicate things that might have been worthy of his class if they were a stepping stone to pure design—nobles weren’t mechanics but they could be the engineers of classified devices—but he could barely install pre-made software combs into the motherwafers without cracking something. Everything had to be clunky and armored just to survive his touch. He fell back into despair, deciding that if he was going to be reduced to being a brawler and a mere mechanic then he might as well combine the two insults to his caste.

His first sparringbot didn’t last long, but he learned from his inexperience and made the next one stronger and smarter. It turned into a race, a battle of his mechanical skills against his physical might. He poured everything he had into making a machine that could defeat even his strength. His psychotic neighbor across the canyon would cackle and say that he’d become his own worst enemy. The comment grated more than it should have because, except for the fact that his self-hatred was completely platonic, it was true. He waged an endless battle against himself, his mind against his body.

Then one night Equius’s mind won. The bot was the strongest, toughest, most ruthless machine he’d ever built. It was far too much even for him. He beat it but just barely and only because he broke his own rule of only fighting the sparringbots barehanded; he’d hooked a pair of cables to the casing and shorted out its systems. His cracked ribs ached with every breath, his gray skin shone blue for all the bruising, but it was the sharp, throbbing, all encompassing pain in his skull that made him black out. He woke up the next perigee to the shrill sound of his recuperacoon’s alarm drilling into his think pan—he’d slept in the sopor for too long and the device was getting him out of the slime through sheer auditory torture—and with great difficultly hoisted himself over the lip and shuffled to his hygieneblock. 

It wasn’t until Equius looked in the mirror that he realized what was causing the unspeakable pain in his head. He reached up, disbelieving, and waved his hand through the air where his right horn used to be.

He slid down to the floor and sat there staring at the wall for a very, very long time.

At last he remembered that he was still covered in sopor. On automatic he staggered up and got himself cleaned up and dressed. After a little more staring at the wall he wandered back to his workblock. Aurthour hadn’t yet cleared away all of the wreckage and after some sifting Equius found his horn in a pile of tangled wires. He turned it over in his hands and examined it with morbid curiosity; he’d never really thought about what color the live part of his horn would be but if he had been asked he’d have guessed that it was the same color as the outer part. He would have been half right. The spongy tissue was a deep swirled green which Equius realized was a result of yellow tissue soaked in blue blood.

Equius knew that he was distracting himself from the fact that his _horn_ was in his hand. He also knew that he needed to get moving. Reattaching a broken horn was difficult but in no way impossible, and given his caste he could easily afford expert care. It had been hours but the tissue should still be alive; there was no part of a troll that wasn’t incredibly tough.

He looked down at the blue marks striping his arms, his head hurt so much he could barely move without vomiting, and the extra dose of sopor made him feel grossly heavy limbed and slow. There were half-cleaned smears of blue blood all over the floors and walls and there was as much damage to the block itself as there was to the broken machines littering the room. As much damage as there was to the young troll standing in the middle of it all.

When Aurthour came back with more cleaning equipment Equius dropped his horn into the trash. It wasn’t the damage he did to himself that made him reconsider his recent life choices; it was the thought of what would happen to his lusus if anything happened to him. Adolescence was hazardous enough for a troll—and their guardians—without him adding to the danger.

He limped along. It was all he could do.


	4. Quadrants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nepeta stepped back and proudly surveyed her handiwork. The floor of her hive was littered with chips and chunks of the cave rock as well as several round stones she had used as hammers. When struck with the harder rocks the deep, ruddy stone of her hive walls came off in wide flakes, leaving behind a smooth fine-grained surface that was suitable for her purposes. She had scrubbed the new flat section until no dust or smudged grime remained and once the stone dried it would make a fine surface for painting.

The young troll flopped back into the bloody hide of her most recent kill. Her lusus sleepily wandered over and sprawled on her charge. Nepeta happily hummed and scratched behind her guardian’s ears as she took a well deserved rest.

There were already plenty of drawings sprinkled across her hive walls, some rough and some more refined. Nepeta dimly remembered shapes and figures painted onto the trialcaverns, along with long dotty lines which she guesses must have been words that her fresh wiggler mind couldn’t yet understand. It was often the case that a troll would be either haunted or fascinated by any wisp of memory from their trials, and Nepeta had always been captivated by the image of red stone walls covered in mysteries. It was why she had chosen a red stone cave to call her hive and why some of her earliest, clearest memories revolved around dragging crude beast-hair brushes across her rocky canvas.

Nepeta had taken extra care on this particular section of wall because it was reserved for a special project. Too excited to wait any longer the young troll wriggled out from under her lusus and grabbed her brushes. She quickly made a large grid of squares divided into two groups. Nepeta hummed as she labeled each side: one heart and one diamond. She bounced on her heels as she considered which potential pairing she should paint first.

Allies at four and a half! Nepeta could still hardly believe it. She counted herself lucky to have been included in her new unit. As far as she was concerned they were the best allies on the planet with a good mix of skills and temperaments; there was a sort of pale quality to a unit’s way of working together that fascinated the young troll. The stronger but more reckless members like Vriska or Karkat would be reined back in by the calmer ones like Tavros or Kanaya, and together they’d be stronger than they would be apart. Of course, there were a lot of trolls who would look down on her for thinking that and would insist that a troll only had allies to further their own ends, so Nepeta tended to keep that to herself.

However the unit worked, it was a given that all the trolls involved had to pull their own weight. That’s why Nepeta was making her shipping wall; she wanted to be useful and one day they’d all have to have their pails in order or face death at the claws of the imperial drone. Nepeta thought it was a good idea to get started early on so there was less of a scramble later, and if there was a scramble then she would be ready. She planned on painting all the options that she thought were possible so she could take it all in at once, and then if someone needed help finding a matesprit she would be able to offer suggestions. She had a side for moirails too because a troll with a moirail often had an easier time filling their concupiscent quadrants than one without; no one wants an unstable matesprit or kismesis.

She didn’t bother with caliginous and ashen both because they didn’t interest her as much as redrom and because her unit already had someone who was interested in blackrom. She wasn’t sure if Karkat would think she was trespassing on his territory if she started looking at the other quadrants; she’d only talked to him once, and even that had been more of an interview than a chat. He insulted her roleplaying a lot and came up with lots of interesting ways to be dubious about her skills; Nepeta thought it went very well. Since she didn’t know him very well and he was a well established member of the unit she decided it was best to play it safe and stay out of ashen and caliginous.

Nepeta decided to start with the trolls she had met. She hummed a bouncy tune—Pounce purred along—and started painting the figures of Aradia and Tavros in a diamond square. She wasn’t sure if they were together or not so she put a question mark next to the square. After a moment’s thought she put them on the heart side too; everyone was still pretty young and the two of them could end up in either quadrant or none at all. After she finished with those two Nepeta painted Vriska on the diamond side and drew a circle around the square; she planned on filling in the other troll as soon as she knew what the spidery girl’s moirail looked like. Nepeta kept it up until she ran out of pairings with trolls she already knew. Then she finished her morning kill and flopped into a pile of tattered furs.

When she woke with the setting sun Nepeta washed up in her stone basin of rainwater and set about her usual evening chores. Once she finished patrolling her territory and making new paint she settled down with her tablet. Having a computing device was still somewhat of a novelty for Nepeta; she’d only gotten it a sweep prior. She was an odd case in that she’d somehow slipped around the signwrights at the mouth of the trials. Because she missed them she didn’t receive her trialrights until she was nearly four and a half.

They told her that it was unusual but not unheard of for a wiggler to miss the signwrights. The trial caverns were natural tunnels, after all, and natural tunnels have narrow unmapped passages that sometimes lead to other exits. They told her that even if she escaped the trials early the fact that she survived without instruction for as long as she did was proof that she was worthy of her trialrights, including breathing. Nepeta had sat on the floor of her cave staring in wonder as they told her that a carpenter drone was on its way and that she had a few sweeps of allowance that she could spend furnishing her new hive.

She decided against that idea and instead stayed in her familiar cave, though she did have the drone add some windows and a proper door. She couldn’t imagine using most of the things on the screens they showed her and in the end she bought very little; new clothes, ablution products, a few tools which looked useful, and a very durable and expensive tablet-style computing device. They seemed a little disappointed that she didn’t build a hive and fill it with things, and they seemed particularly puzzled over her sleeping habits, but they let her do what she wanted.

She could still hardly believe that _they_ had really been there in _her_ hive. There were other kids who remembered the signwrights, of course, but memories from the time of the trials were smoky and faded like trying to recall a dream. Nepeta had never met anyone else who had seen an adult troll when they were old enough to have clear memories of the encounter.

Sometimes Nepeta wondered if that was why her unit took her in. She had accidentally stumbled into a FLARP session between Teams Scourge and Charge and she had baffled the four players with her complete lack of knowledge about the game. Once she had received her tablet she started devouring learning modules but there was still quite a bit that she hadn’t gotten to, and FLARP happened to be one of those things. Nepeta knew it was a bad idea to talk to four trolls she had just angered by ruining their game, but something in her gut told her that they were okay. She turned out to be right and after she told them her story Tavros gave her his Trollian handle. Nepeta started talking to him and soon enough the other three were added to her contact list. She decided she liked them, all of them, even the scratchy spider girl. Somehow it turned out that they felt the same because after a season Terezi offered Nepeta a place in their unit.

She clicked on the jade green handle in her contact list and set forth with the mission of getting a picture of Vriska’s moirail. Nepeta knew that however interesting she was because of the adults she had met it wasn’t going to carry her forever. She was determined to be a valuable member of her unit. They would all be so quadranted and that would make them more stable and safer and happier.

Kanaya was just as nice to talk to the second time and she even insisted on making her newest ally a blood-colored coat for the darker seasons. She was even receptive to the request to make it very long so it would look cool when the huntress leaped onto her prey. When Nepeta asked for the girl’s photo she hadn’t expected Kanaya to be quite that elegant and beautiful, and after an hour’s deliberation she drew the two of them in one of the heart squares. They’d only just started talking and it wasn’t flush on sight by any means, but like most of her possible pairings she felt it might be an option later on. She added Vriska and Kanaya to another heart square while she was at it, since quadrant flips happened all the time, and she was almost done filling in Vriska’s pretty hair when she was trolled by someone new.

She burrowed into a pile of furs and looked at her screen with excited curiosity. Nepeta had voraciously gone through all the datagrubs the adults had left her so she knew that she was supposed to wait for the various established members of the unit to contact her. She also knew that it wasn’t unusual for trolls to wait a while and see how well the new member meshed with the others, putting off the first conversation for perigees or even seasons. However, knowing that the waiting was normal didn’t make the waiting easier. 

Nepeta tapped the alert for the new Trollian contact request and quickly checked the handle against the list that Terezi had given her. Her eyes lit up with glee when she saw that the new troll was indeed a member of the unit. This would be the seventh of the eleven trolls to talk to her and it wasn’t that long ago that Terezi invited her into their circle. There had been some rough patches, like when Karkat had gotten irritated at her roleplaying, but Nepeta thought that those patches must be rough like her lusus’s tongue; a little scratchy but pleasant all the same. 

With that in mind she dove into the new chat with the new troll. 

Nepeta felt like hitting herself in the head with her tablet husktop or possibly one of the stones she had used on her shipping wall. She didn’t want to come on too strong and she had always planned on saving her roleplaying for her farewell, as she had with the others, but instead of merely holding back a little she held back everything. There was something that had her acid sack doing a funny dance as though she had swallowed a whole swarm of flutterbeasts. 

When the others had mentioned CT she had been interested in learning more. Tradition being tradition there wasn’t much they could tell her; new members of the unit were allowed some basic details about their allies but the majority had to wait until they were contacted by the troll in question. Tavros had said that CT built robots, and Terezi said that he was a strong hand to hand fighter, but that was all they had been willing to give up. Vriska had been a little more willing to bend the rules but Nepeta wasn’t sure how seriously she could take that information. It wasn’t that she thought that Vriska was lying for the sake of it, but then again Nepeta had been told that backstabbing was a part of a blueblood’s regular perigee. Nepeta didn’t know the rules to that particular game yet, so she didn’t know if Vriska saying that CT was a creepy loner lurker who smelled bad was part of it or not.

Nepeta wrote out a long response, read it, and then deleted it. It had been so easy to be interesting with the others but at that moment everything she thought of seemed annoying to her. She settled for boring.

Nepeta furrowed her brow and absently chewed on her stylus. None of the others had been so abrupt when they had interviewed her, or at least, not in the same way. Not all of them had been, strictly speaking, polite. Karkat had been very rude at points but it was tempered with a grudging respect—he seemed to trust Terezi’s judgment. Even when he had been insulting it was usually in a way that insulted everyone equally, like asking if Nepeta had suffered some serious head injury and then saying she’d fit right in with the rest of the pan-damaged unit. This Equius seemed far less accepting, even if he was calmer. 

She shook her head and reminded herself that she was just looking at some words on a screen. Sometimes she imagined that she could tell what people were feeling, even over Trollian, but she _knew_ that she was only imagining it. When the adults came to her hive they put a funny device on her head and next to her heart, and the machine told them that she didn’t have any psychic abilities. Even if she did have some sort of telepathy or empathy she didn’t think she’d be able to feel things over the internet.

It was hard to remember that when her gut was telling her things. It _felt_ like Equius was being rude. It _felt_ like he wanted help, though she couldn’t begin to guess what he might need help with.

Nepeta made one last bid for logic and told herself that he was probably just testing her.

Nepeta made sure she read his response right and then she made a furious noise deep in her throat. Testing her was one thing, throwing around the same insults thrown at everyone else was fine, but she would _not_ stand to be insulted like that. She completely forgot about saving the roleplaying for after he had at least tenuously accepted her as an ally; she was hurt and angry and she grounded herself in the familiar.

Nepeta’s high growl woke her lusus. Pounce leapt up and tried to find the source of her charge’s distress, but of course there was little a cat could do about unpleasant blue words on a tablethusk screen. While the lusus sniffed around the hive the troll scribbled and the tablet did its best to invent letters out of the tangle of rage.

He wasn’t the first troll to think that Nepeta’s bright personality meant that she didn’t understand the way troll society functioned. However, she had been around trolls before she was discovered as a piece of missing paperwork and she knew full well what happened to ferals. When the adults came to her hive she could hear something rustling in the trees outside and she knew exactly what it was. Nepeta still avoided the place where she found the culling drone’s claw marks in the trees. Nepeta’s proof of her stability was in the fact that she was still breathing; if any of the five adults crowded into her cave thought she was feral then she would have died then and there.

She had _proof_ that she was a useful troll and finally she had found allies who believed her. Of course she was excited! Of course she was happy! Of course she wanted to share it with her new friends! There wasn’t anything wrong with how she was acting, but this Equius was talking as though he would recommend her for the culling list even though they’d only spent a few minutes on Trollian.

Disgusted by the whole thing, Nepeta tossed her tablet into a fur pile and tried to sooth her worried lusus. Pounce could smell her charge’s irritation and was frustrated that she couldn’t find the source. Nepeta was still trying to calm both of them down when her tablet chimed with a new message. She was ready to lash into Equius but the flashing notification wasn’t in blue.

Nepeta felt her acid sack twist up. She hadn’t given much thought to Equius’s threat in the heat of the moment, but suddenly the idea of getting kicked out of the unit due to his influence was very real and very, very scary.

Nepeta felt as though the harsh sunlight had faded and that the soft pink moons had come out.

Nepeta got up and did a little victory dance. Pounce, smelling the positive change in her charge’s mood, gave the troll’s hand a sandpapery lick and flopped down for a nap. After Nepeta had used up some of the rush of happy energy she curled up against her lusus’s side and continued her conversation with Karkat.

After reading that Nepeta felt a little guilty for sinking her teeth so deep into Equius’s archery skills. She changed the subject and got Karkat talking about his romance movies, which he was happy to do at length. She also talked him into sending over a picture so she could add him to the shipping wall. Nepeta decided that Karkat was really nice under his grumpy exterior, and he was also super cute, so she filled in a heart square with the two of them.

Once she finished that she turned to the pale side and reluctantly wrote ‘CT’ in small letters at the corner of one square. She doubted that Equius would give her a picture anytime soon but she felt she needed to start working on finding him a moirail. He definitely needed one. No one in the unit leapt to mind, but she reasoned that since she still had three trolls to meet she might still luck out.

The perigees passed and her shipping wall had fewer and fewer empty squares. Their de facto commanding officer was the last troll Nepeta met. Karkat was right about the two of them getting along and with her blessing Nepeta’s probationary period officially ended. A season later and Nepeta could still scarcely believe that she was in a unit with the _heir apparent herself_. The shock of seeing that fuchsia handle faded in time and Nepeta worked up the courage to talk to her CO on a regular basis. Eventually, Nepeta realized her apprehension was unfounded as Feferi was extremely friendly, if a little tactless at times, and as sauce on the grubloaf the future empress was equality minded.

Once that realization occurred Nepeta had been confused as to why Feferi kept someone like Equius in her unit. Then she looked at the shipping wall and the square on the diamond side circled and marked as a done deal. The young matchmaker reasoned that if Feferi was pale with someone like Eridan then the she probably saw the same sort of promise in Equius.

Nepeta set out with a renewed resolve to find a moirail for the jerk. She’d never given up on that quest, just as she’d not given up on any of them, but she’d pushed it to the back of the line. With a sigh she filled in the reserved square with a drawing of Gamzee—she couldn’t think of any other ally who would put up with Equius –and once that bit of stalling was done she set herself to the task of finding out more about her target.

About five minutes into their second conversation Nepeta had fallen back to scribbling in her message field and Equius actually got mad enough that he forgot his prefix quirk on a line. Instead of abandoning his husktop as he had the first time he actually blocked her as a means to end the conversation. Nepeta was ready to let the guy rot but then Equius unblocked her on the same perigee and apologized in a succinct and incredibly meek way. She wasn’t quite sure what she should make of his startling change of attitude. A few perigees later she found out that Feferi had told him to stop being so mean to their newest ally. After that night anytime tempers started flying Equius would suddenly stop his insults and act stiffly polite no matter what Nepeta said.

Once, she deliberately tried to start a fight just to see what would happen. They quickly reached the point where he stopped fighting back but she kept going. A couple times he slipped and some of his temper showed through but in both instances he got himself under control, tenuous though it was, within a few lines.

When he logged off Nepeta reread the conversation. She’d known for a long time that there was little chance of anything black forming between the two of them—it takes a lot more than irritation to build a proper rivalry—but that night proved to her that there wasn’t even something shallow going on there. She felt guilty about pushing him so far and then felt puzzled about the guilt. She still despised the way he looked down on others but felt a grudging respect for the way he followed his own annoying rules. She didn’t like the way he told her what to do and she didn’t like the way he let himself be bossed around by trolls who didn’t have his best interests in mind. Even the standing order from Feferi to be nice to the new girl sat the wrong way with Nepeta, but she didn’t know what to do about it.

Even more confusing were the things he was saying about her, which she was only just starting to pay attention to. He would tell her she was foolish for freely admitting her ignorance when it came to the things she hadn’t caught up on since she was officially put on the books. He was appalled at her ablution habits—nonexistent according to him—and always lectured her about hygiene and all the things that could be growing in her hair and under her fingernails. The offensive, superior way he said these things made her want to throw something at him, but once she’d cooled down and examined the message under all the insults she had to admit that he had a point about some of it. She found herself looking up modules on dressing down beasts and properly tanning hides and then she’d catch herself and wonder what she was doing.

It wasn’t until the answer was thrown in her face that she realized what was going on.

Nepeta came close to hitting herself in the head with her tablet. They’d reached the point where he remembered Feferi’s ‘orders’ to be nice. 

Nepeta felt some of the fight drain out of her. She sighed and chewed on the inside of her cheek as she brooded over the situation.

The universe snapped into focus.

Nepeta opened a new Trollian window.


	5. Backscratch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Memory is a funny thing. Different scenes can roll around in a person’s mind like cascading marbles, coming to rest out of chronological order. Perception tints the film, making it a different shade, editing out that which was not considered important at the time, or melting out whole scenes. Imagination can collide with recorded reality resulting in details of pure invention which feel just as solid as the things that actually happened. Chemicals and physical damage could cause the nerves to short and spark, adding a whole new element of random to how things transfer from short-term to long-term memory.

So, when someone tries to track back and figure out where things first started to go wrong, it’s not as simple as hitting chapter back on a DVD player.

Dave remembered the day before John’s birthday, the day before the game, the day Before. Bro was always completely fucking inscrutable but there was an extra layer of detachment that morning. Or maybe there wasn’t and Dave was simply skewed in his hindsight. That timeframe was too fresh, too new, too wrapped up in the emotionally charged clusterfuck of After. Everything was fluid and shimmering like an oil rainbow floating on the water’s surface. Dave knew that his memories of that timeframe would be completely unreliable.

He scratched the record back.

His birthday, devoid of any note or mention save for the three brightly colored packages waiting for him on the kitchen table. Bro had never paid any attention to birthdays so there was never a present from him, though Dave counted the fact that the boxes from his friends were on the table and not buried in a waist-deep pile of plush ass as Bro’s birthday gift. Some people took Bro’s complete lack of recognizing birthdays as a thing to be some form of sinister child abuse, but it wasn’t as though Bro didn’t give his younger brother stuff. In fact, he gave his younger brother what might be considered a metric shit-ton of stuff. There were turntables and iPhones and at least half of the dead things lining Dave’s walls, and that’s not even counting the more utilitarian junk like finding a new pair of shoes hanging from the showerhead or the envelop of money he found in a box of Pop-Tarts along with a note to only spend it on the most ironically hipster of winter jackets. When Dave was younger he thought that Bro’s official response to the notion of birthdays was the absolute truth: that birthdates were arbitrary things and that it was far more ironic to spoil a kid on a day even more arbitrary than what was on their birth certificate. As Dave got older he started to wonder if there hadn’t been something more mundanely financial about that, but he tried not to dwell on it too much. The idea that a lack of money could tame the great Bro Strider was laughable at best.

Birthdates. Arbitrary.

As he was thinking back Dave found himself thinking it was his thirteenth birthday that John gave him the shades, but it was actually his sixteenth—even a sharp human mind like his was a badly scratched vinyl jumping and skipping across the tracks. It was the perfect gift, and as soon as they touched Dave’s face he had hit the Google hard searching for something just as ironic and, if he was being honest with himself which he never was, just as thoughtful. It was a tongue-in-cheek smartass kind of thoughtful, but it was what worked for them. They were best bros and being smartasses was just part of the gig. It was a milder version of the snarky rivalry he had going on with Rose, where he searched high and low for the set of fancy tortoiseshell hair combs which she would be opening the next day. It was rougher than what he had with Jade, mostly because she flat out refused to acknowledge the game, and he didn’t expect her to even notice that the fancy silver hairpin he’d gotten her that year was ironically shaped like a cat instead of a dog. 

Memory. Things important at the time highlighted in garish neon yellow, the things important in the present fade back in the shadows. What was the expression on Bro’s face when he saw those shades for the first time? Was there a double take, a second glance, was there anything other than the flat ‘cool shades, bro’ and the slightest nod? Was there anything shifting behind the mask? Was there anything under the mask at all?

Dave scratched it back.

He had always assumed it was part of the veil of irony shrouding Bro’s every move. Bro didn’t particularly care about Dave’s grades, but he did care a lot about Dave’s schooling. It wasn’t a big deal if Dave brought home a D on his history final but he better as all hell be able to rattle off all the important information. If not he’d have to study until he could. It was the testing and the emphasis on memorizing dates that Bro found unnecessary; he didn’t see multiple choice as a valid form of assessing knowledge and he thought that the who and the why were far more important than the when. Which is why, even if he wasn’t proving it to the system, Dave would still have to prove he was learning to his brother. For history and lit he had to tell the stories, for math and science he had to explain the principles. There was also an emphasis on actually being able to work out a problem or dissect a book if he had to, but that was secondary.

Something that Bro did insist on Dave doing ‘properly’ were the accounting and computer application type of classes. Dave got it though, because after all those classes taught actual useful real world skills, and Bro insisted on good grades because business involved playing by the rules of others. As much as Dave would have liked to believe that all they needed was Dorito dust and the magic of irony, they had to pay the bills somehow. By the time he hit middle school Dave could properly balance several bank accounts and was running the money side of his sites completely unsupervised. There were some things he needed Bro’s official approval for, since Dave was still a minor, but all that amounted to was Dave leaving the paperwork hanging on the wall by a shuriken and Bro would sign it and send it off. They crossed their Ts and dotted their Is since, no matter how lame it was, they had to abide by society’s rules. At the age of eleven Dave was more fiscally responsible than most twenty-somethings, but the law said that he wasn’t allowed to do things labeled as ‘adult’ so that was what they had to work around.

Dave learned that no matter what you did there were some rules you could never break, but if you really put your mind to it you could find a way to slide around them.

It was one of those ultimate ironies when dumbasses at school—kid _and_ adult—said that Dave was a slacker. His books were a lot thicker than even the honor students. He learned to read on Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers. By the time he was seven he could name the whole Greek pantheon all the way down to the lesser knows like Nyx and Hebe. By the time he was twelve he was reading Verne, Heinlein, and Edgar Allen Poe. In his freshman year he got sent to the office for rolling his eyes at his lit teacher when she lectured him about the lack of effort put into his essay on the puff short story of the week. The principle was not exactly impressed when Dave pointed out that he probably knew more about Beowulf than the entire teaching staff put together. It didn’t matter that it was true.

Bro agreed in principle, though Dave could tell that he was a little irked that he had to come down for a parent-teacher conference over the incident. Not that the Striders didn’t turn it into a game that the others weren’t even aware they were losing, but Dave could understand that Bro had shit to do and making this sort of thing a habit would disrupt that. So, even though it made Dave grit his teeth sometimes, he played nice from then on. He still wasn’t a teacher’s pet, but he made sure he pulled at least Cs in everything and didn’t talk back again. It was ironic, after all, to act all docile when he was really a coiled spring of heavy knowledge.

A lot of Bro’s ideas about schooling made sense. The dismissal of standardized tests, the scorn for the way the system was set up, the way he insisted that Dave pull As in the classes that taught marketable skills. Knowing why the Civil War started was far more useful than knowing the exact date the first shots were fired. Knowing how to set up a business ledger was helpful for the kind of business the Striders did while knowing how to make a corporate résumé was not. At its core, under the layers of misdirection, it was a remarkably practical philosophy.

So practical that it didn’t make sense that Bro required Dave to know so much about mythology and other dusty forms of literature. Having a passing knowledge of many subjects was of course a handy thing for the higher forms of rap, but Bro’s requirements always felt a little excessive for it to just be that. It wasn’t like Bro to insist on a body of knowledge unless he thought Dave was actually going to use it.

He scratched it back.

Dave thought about rooftop battles, all blending together into a Rocky-style montage. It was a jumble, out of order, and there was no point in trying to lay out each rhyme and each strike on a timeline. The strife sessions simply _were_ ; they were an indisputable and constant fact if your last name was Strider and that was that. It didn’t matter when he got gravel burn on his left shoulder by being launched across the rooftop, it didn’t matter when he bruised his ribs by falling wrong, it didn’t matter when he got tongue tied and Bro paid him the worst insult by walking away while Dave stood there gaping like a chump. What mattered was that it kept happening.

He was nine when he found out that hardcore sparring matches with your siblings were not considered normal.

The other three couldn’t match him for pure strifing skill. John had the brute force of heavy-handed alchemy, Rose had her shrewdness and the game-given ability of telekinesis, and Jade had her impressive arsenal and god dog. None of them knew the strategy, the finesse, none of them knew how to dance around an enemy with nothing more than a broken sliver of steel and come away breathing.

He scratched it back.

On the surface it would seem that Bro’s policy was ‘trust no one’. He’d even quote X-Files at people who gave him shit about it. Dave, however, knew the truth. It was one of those very rare times when Bro dropped all irony and gave it to him straight. Usually those moments were all about things like how to take a fall without breaking your arm or other matters directly associated with potential bodily harm, but in that instance it was about the foggier concept of relationships.

Bro told Dave that people would burn him. Giving a person his trust was like handing them a knife and then offering them his back. Bro said that playing it close to the chest kept that sort of thing from happening. He also said that trying to apply a cookie-cutter approach to trust was foolhardy at best and really fucking stupid at worst. There were Striders, the ones who never showed weakness, and then there were the people who handed out knives like candy. Bro said that those people were idiots, and then things got weird, because he said that it was important to remember that the people who didn’t trust were idiots too. Those who trusted too much were always digging knives out of their backs and the people who trusted too little never had anyone to watch theirs.

Then Bro told him that at some point Dave was going to have to do it. He was going to have to hand that blade over and trust the other person not to bury it to the hilt. Bro said that Dave would have to find balance, someone who trusted too much to average out how he trusted too little. Because the thing was that Dave was never going to be able to function as one of those people who had the right balance all on their own; Bro made it very clear that it wasn’t in their nature or best interest to be anything other than what they were. So, since Dave wouldn’t be able to find the balance by himself, he was going to have to find someone else incapable of it except in the other extreme. Bro said that it would probably be both the hardest and the easiest thing Dave would ever do, and that once Dave found that group who he trusted without hesitation it would be his job to protect them,

It baffled Dave and he spent a lot of time trying to find the hidden meaning even though he knew in his gut that Bro had been speaking the honest truth. Then he met a silly girl who thought that posting her furry inclinations to the whole fucking internet was a good idea. Then they got to talking and for the first time in his life Dave found someone who saw straight through the multi-layered mask so ever-present that half the time he didn’t know where it stopped and he began. Then she wriggled her way into his life like it was nothing at all and by the time he realized what was going on it was already too late. Then she introduced him to Rose who-trusts-too-little and John who-trusts-too-much and it was as though they were made for each other, this complete mismatching set.

Then came the day in a group chat when they gave each other their respective addresses. Dave handed all three of them a knife, turned around, and never looked back.

He scratched it back.

It was his earliest clear memory, except maybe it wasn’t. There were things in his head that could have happened before, could have happened after, but it still stood out as what he would consider his first solid instance of recollection. There was some little thing that Dave did or forgot to do and it ended up with something ending up broken on the floor—he didn’t remember those specifics because he was so young and because it wasn’t the important part about that moment. The important thing was that Bro turned it into a learning experience. He coached Dave back through the chain reaction that lead to something getting broken. He taught Dave how to scratch back and back until the source was identified. Bro taught his little brother that if you look hard enough, if you remember carefully enough, if you scratch it back far enough, then you can find that one decision that led to the eventual disaster.

Dave thought about all of that and laughed. It was a short, dry, humorless bark that hurt his throat. The bastard knew. Dave didn’t know how, but one way or the other his brother knew where the infuriating threads of paradox space were pulling him.

There was a burning pit of rage in Dave’s stomach, but he ignored it. It wasn’t his job to be emotional. It wasn’t his job to trust too much. It was his job to fix everything when the others got in too deep.

He stood there on his roof surrounded by boiling heat and stared at the Pesterchum window on his iShades. He had long since deleted the handles in his trollslum, deleted everything except for those three names belonging to the three people in any universe who he trusted with his back. Rose’s glowed lavender. John and Jade’s were gray. They had been gray for months.

The Knight of Time knew where he was going, He’d had a lot of time to think back, to pour over his memories, and track down that one instance where he made the wrong choice. He knew what he had to do. As soon as the program informed him that tentacleTherapist was idle he flexed his fingers over his turntables and thought back to the day, the first day, back to the moment when he failed to stop John from flying off to face the denizen.

Dave scratched it back.


End file.
